In this blog I talk about some of the personal programming I do as a hobby. By trade I'm a Java and database developer but I've dabbled in Haskell, front-end development, etc. I'm currently working as an architect but still enjoy getting my fingers dirty in code!

Friday, August 28, 2015

A Reddit clone (very basic) using Local Storage and no server side storage

Some weeks ago there was a bit of a tussle over at Reddit, with subreddits going private in protest, talk of censorship, etc. This was interesting to see, from a distance. It got me thinking about trying to replicate Reddit, a site where people can share stuff and have discussions, but without having the server control all the data. So I've developed a very basic Reddit clone, where you can post links and stories and comment on them. You can also upvote stories and comments, and downvote what you upvoted (cancel your upvote). But there's a catch: the site has no database. Things are kept in memory, and on the users machine, via the HTML 5 LocalStorage. That's all!

Everytime you upload or upvote something, it gets saved to your LocalStorage for the site. Once something gets downvoted to zero, it disappear. When you go to the site, whatever is in your LocalStorage gets uploaded and upvoted again. So stories can come and go as users connect and disconnect, and only the most popular stories will always be visible on the site (since at least one connected user needs to have uploaded or upvoted a story for it to be visible).

Of course, there is still a server, that could decide to censor stories, modify text, but at least you can always check that what you have on YOUR machine is the data you wanted. you can always copy that data elsewhere easily for safe keeping (browser developer tools let you inspect your LocalStorage content).